Bleeder (12 page)

I shrug my shoulders. “I think it’s the alcohol talking. I’m usually the shy guy you’d never meet.”

“Sure you are. That’s okay. You don’t have to lie.” She opens her purse, pulls out a notepad, writes a number on it, tears a sheet off, folds it, and passes it to me. “Here. Here’s your number.” I read it aloud.

“Is this real? It doesn’t sound like a real number. There’s too many fives.”

“Guess you’ll just have to call it to find out,” she says as she stands to leave. She gives me a playful wave and slips away.

I polish off my drink and play the scrap of paper between my fingers much as if I were twirling a flower.

Walking home, I pause before a house’s bay window and listen to a piano echoing from within. The sound, soft and distant, haunts the quiet night. I lower myself to the curb and close my eyes in silent appreciation of this moonlight sonata.

Saturday when Kaitlin arrives for our date, we stroll through a downtown redolent with the smells of summer. We walk, we talk, and a block away from the swirling black waters of the Cape Fear River and amid the thrum
of nightlife, we dine. I like that I can now order wine, so as we settle into our sidewalk table, I request a bottle. It is quickly brought for me to taste, and, pronouncing it good, glasses are poured, and we toast.

“To our first date,” I say, raising up the wine.

We drink. The bread comes. We eat. The salads arrive. We eat. And when the seafood lands, we eat, refilling our wine glasses all the while.

“The check, sir,” the waiter says, presenting the billfold. And as I count out several twenties, I ignore the great sum spent, telling myself I’m buying happiness.

On our way out, I pause in the door’s threshold and mention a nearby coffee shop, adding that it’s poetry slam night.

“Let’s go!” she enthuses.

So along Front Street, we squeeze between bodies swaying down the avenue in summer intoxication. Clusters of pedestrians form moving walls along the sidewalk, and Kaitlin and I must dodge from one side to another, stepping off the curb and then back on as we go. When we enter the coffeehouse, Kaitlin reserves a table while I order. Then I sit, as a patron reads poetry from the small stage. This young poet muses about love, and although I recognize his meaning, I am glad that it is not something I have written. When he nears the end, his voice crescendos and feedback squeals out from the speakers, deafening me. Then the young poet gives a slight bow to say that he is done. Kaitlin and I smile politely, and we clap. Another poet takes the stage. She reads a poem where she was gifted a dead father for Christmas, and it is sad. Sort of. She steps down. We clap. Another takes her place. I refill our coffees.

Later as we walk back to my house, our conversation carries us along. I tell her about Ana; she talks about Ray, her former boyfriend. I tell her I come from a small town; she says that she does, too. And so it goes, while the moon rises in the east and glides overhead. I stray from any talk about my hemophilia or HIV. There is no handbook for people with HIV, and there are no rules for how I should date, but I know that this, our first date is not the one for such a serious topic. I fear my HIV would ruin any hope I have with Kaitlin.

On my front stoop, the sound of our voices in the night lulls me
into a good feeling, and I want us to linger there forever, but eventually Kaitlin stirs.

“I should go,” she says. The coffee has worn off, and the date has come to its inevitable end.

“You should have let me pick you up like a real gentleman,” I say as we approach her car.

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind driving, and you were closer to downtown.”

We hug. Then I feel it: the drawing closer. And we kiss. And it’s so uncomplicated, so simple. Before she leaves, we lean in again, breaking apart slowly.

“We should do this again,” she says. “Call me.”

“Count on it.”

After her car disappears, I lock the front door, climb the steps, and crawl outside my window to watch a night as bright as silver day. The stars shine overhead, and the downtown river pulls down the crescent moon. I stretch out and trace constellations on this twinkling canvas, lining out Perseus, Pegasus, and Ursa Minor.

Kaitlin and I share a string of several nights together, all reminiscent of our first date: a walk downtown; a meal; wine; coffee; and a few heavy kisses as my fan whirs beside us laid out on my mattress. I do not push things beyond the roaming of hands, and Kaitlin always leaves before passion overrides reason, at least until a night, two weeks later.

Kaitlin and I have eaten dinner, watched a movie, and we now recline on my mattress reading. I have Flaubert, she Plath. It is late, and Kaitlin stretches her arms out and yawns, letting her book rest in her lap.

“Tired?” I ask.

“Very,” she says as she lies back.

I close my book. She puts her head against my chest. The night rustles with kisses and movement.

“Should I go home, tonight?” she asks. “I know it’s not that far, but . . . well . . .” She looks to me, and I realize that the time has come for me to tell. We kiss again, and my heart tenses.

So I begin: “When I was a little boy about ten . . .”

When I finish, Kaitlin huddles with her knees between her arms, staring at nothing. It is a moment one could breathe a life between. The night paints us in shadow and mystery and sorrow. When Kaitlin cries, she buries her face in the hollow of my chest, and I hold her and let the darkness fall around us.

I glance around the room and notice Kaitlin’s book of poems still open beside her. It was this, I think, she was reading before her life changed. When she falls asleep, I get up quietly and shut my door, turn the fan on low, and pull a sheet over us. I rest my arm across her and lie against her. However, I cannot sleep. Outside, the full moon paints a silver silhouette of the elm tree against my blue wall. It moves ever so slightly as the hours go by and as the fan whirs wind over my sad heart.

In the morning, the shaking bed wakes me and I blink open my eyes and see Kaitlin gathering her things. I kick off the covers, and Kaitlin looks over to me.

“I’m going home,” she says. “I can’t sleep anymore.”

“Okay.” I prop myself up in bed, hold the pillow between my arms as if it is her. “Will I see you again?”

“Yes. Don’t be silly.” She clasps her purse shut. Zips her bookbag.

“Okay. When?”

“I don’t know. I need some time, okay. I can’t talk right now. There’s too much in my head.” She stoops to kiss me good-bye—a light peck on my cheek—and suddenly, I am alone in the world again.

I cannot sleep, so I pull myself up and make coffee, thinking of what I should do on my day off. It already feeling somehow spoiled, I try to slug through: a few hours at the coin laundry, another hour divided between lunch and grocery shopping, and several long minutes edging my way through a slow river of traffic. The sun crests the midway point as morning drops into afternoon. I visit the tobacco shop, purchase a cigar, and carry this to a patch of sand overlooking the waterway channel at Wrightsville Beach. White gulls swoop above the water, diving occasionally, and a few vessels motor by, their flags whipping in the coastal breeze and their small carriage sailing underneath the drawbridge. I clip
the cigar’s end, light it, breathe in, and taste. The yellow smoke puffs in an ocean of sea-blue sky.

For several days, Kaitlin doesn’t call. My heart beats uneasily, nettled by unhappiness. But then one afternoon, there is a knock at my door, and, when I open it, she is there.

“I think I just needed time,” she says. “I needed to think clearly about this, and I couldn’t have you in the way.”

“And what does this mean?” I brace myself against the doorknob gripped in my palm.

“I like you.” My heart races. “And I think I’d like to work through this. But . . .” My heart slows. “After my last relationship, I felt so used there, and I don’t want to feel like that again. I didn’t feel like a person. So, already you can see I’m not a big fan of sex.”

I clench the doorknob, then release. “I can understand that. We can leave sex off the table for awhile.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’m gonna want to for a very long time really. I just wanted to be clear on that upfront.”

“Oh. Okay. I see.”

“Well really, and more importantly, my abstinence isn’t related to . . . well . . . you know. . . . Because it’s not. It’s a decision I was already working towards.” She comes toward me and we hug. “So do you think we can give this a shot?”

I pause, think. “It’s definitely worth a shot.”

And we are back together as before. We listen to albums and, later that night, we climb underneath my covers, which soon rustle with kisses and heavy petting.

“Is this okay?” I ask as I slide my hand into her panties.

“Yes,” she breathes out. “This is great. I want you to.” She leans back and nudges my hand lower; then she places her hand in my boxers, and we please one another as we can. A thought crosses my mind whether, without HIV, we’d be having sex, but I squash it and let desire take over, and soon, this quenched, we cuddle close: her chestnut hair tickling my nose while I kiss her shoulder and the nape of her neck.

“I love you,” I whisper into her ear.

“What?” she asks, turning her face toward me.

“I said, ‘I love you.’”

“Oh . . .” She rests a hand against my face. “I love you, too.”

She nestles close. She holds me. I hold her. We pet. We tremble. We sleep.

THE PINE CONE DID IT

S
EPTEMBER 1993
. I
PEDAL THROUGH DUSK, MY BIKE GLIDING SWIFTLY
along the campus’s flat sidewalk. Crickets chirp. Cicadas sing. The fall wind blows and puffs up my loose-fitting shirt. And the fading sun makes silhouettes of trees whose outlines I steer over as I coast. The evening sunbeams flicker through the longleaf pines as a strobe light, and I squint when my eyes water, loosening my grip on the handlebars to swipe a hand over my eyes; and when I can see again, it is too late. My front tire jams into a pine cone the size of my forearm. The wheel locks at ninety degrees and the bike jerks to a stop, throwing me from the seat. I fly over my handlebars and yell in pain when my right foot lodges between the wheel’s spokes and twists my knee.

My body pounds on the ground, and the concussive force thrusts a gasp of air from my lungs and flattens my round heart against a hard mat of earth. Then for a moment, the world softens as if in a dream: the swaying trees and the freshly cut grass are chimeras of green, and the autumn air drifts with the perfume of fall wildflowers. I gulp a tentative breath. My heart fills again with blood and returns to beating. Then the pain comes piercing and unrelenting as if slivers of metal are stabbing at my knee from the inside out. I rest against my elbows, catch my breath, and slide myself backwards along the grass to dislodge my foot, still anchored to the bike tire,
and as it drops to listlessly rest upon the ground, an intense agony rises from my knee joint. Wrenching my mouth in anguish at the great pain, I labor to breathe as I cup my hands against my knee and feel the swelling. The skin stretches tight against my jeans and presses at the seams, the bloom of swelling restrained only by my patella—a cap upon a boiling radiator of blood.

Turning onto my stomach, I place my palms into damp grass and attempt to lift myself, but a fiery spasm wracks my body, and I grit my teeth and practice slow breaths again. When I regain myself, I muster all my mettle to endure pain and push off from the ground with my arms. It is a great and fierce thrust that lifts me and lets me hoist myself up, where I shift my weight to my left leg to lessen the pain in the injured right one. But still the hurt rages. I bite my tongue and displace the pain to the roll of tasteless skin now gripped between my teeth.

I hobble toward my bike and place a hand upon the frame and ease my injured leg over the seat as if slowly mounting a saddle, and when it dangles above the ground, I push forward with tentative kicks. The wheels move. My leg cries out. I clamp my teeth into my tongue. A whistle of painful air leaks out of the corners of my mouth. I kick again.

When I arrive at my suite, I pull myself up to the second landing and drag my leg through the suite’s corridor using the furniture and walls as balances, and then I drop onto my bed, gripping both hands around my kneecap and crying out in pain. I rock back and forth; tears spill onto my shirt; and with my hands still locked around my joint, I try to summon those magical potions from my childhood.
Abracadabra. Make it go away. Abracadabra. Make it go away.
But it does not work.

I phone Kaitlin, who arrives and quickly gets the Vicodin that most hemophiliacs keep handy. Then I show her my knee: the kneecap lost in a globe of expanding flesh. Her hazel eyes widen and then start to water.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks, marveling at my knee’s size.

“Yes. But I need to go to the emergency room, and I need you to drive me there. Get Sean to help. He should be in his room.”